This Is What Happens When We Forget About Plans And Just Fire Blind

….but least the A-Team remembered they were all on the same side. Leading to the question of the day: Is Grover Norquist – who was a tax policy Tea Partier years before the Tea Party was a glimmer in Ted Cruz’s eye – now a “RINO establishment squish”?

I report, you decide. But be warned; Mr. Norquist makes points that somebody else you might know was making not all that long ago [Note: the Newsmax vid wouldn't embed, but this Fox News interview captures the gist]:

Now, as I’ve been saying this week, I don’t cry over spilled milk. Whether or not a government shutdown was the right strategy is irrelevant; it’s here, and we have to win it, whatever the cost – and that just might be a growing possibility.

But I do want to underscore one point that Mr. Norquist made:

“The House Republicans admitted they were told if you vote for this, ‘I, Ted Cruz, and others will make it go through the Senate and then the president will sign it. It’ll be amazing.’ And he has no plan, no strategy.“

The GOP leadership, on the other hand, did have a plan, says Norquist….

“The Republicans have a strategy which was to move the continuing resolution until after the debt ceiling,” he says. “So just put a clear CR out for a couple of months and then you negotiate on debt ceiling, you wrap it into the next CR, and it’ll all be dealt with together.

“Ted Cruz came in and said, no, no, no, no, no, if you’re not for defunding Obamacare on the CR, you’re an appeaser of Hitler, you’re a coward — ugly name-calling. A lot of Republicans are very unhappy that this was going on.

“Cruz’s strategy didn’t go anywhere. Cruz pushed all the Republicans out into traffic and then he wandered off. He told them it’d be safe — it wasn’t. He told them it would work — it didn’t.

“He needs to apologize to all the Republicans who were misled about this strategy that he didn’t implement.”

Because, you know, there wasn’t one. Just as it was, evidently, all about him. Until it, you know, failed miserably, as even the biggest political naïf should have been able to predict.

As I wrote to a friend the other day:

[T]his…is my biggest concern about the Tea Party, that they…are being led to expect miracles that aren’t deliverable, and when they don’t get them, they’ll tear apart the only vehicle [the Republican Party] by which the long term goal [taking back the country, much less repealing and replacing ObamaCare] can be reached….

It’s not a question of “run and hide” OR “fight”. But there’s more than one means of fighting, and more than one avenue of attack. I’d prefer the one that has the best chance of success and of our “forces” remaining intact and not at each other’s throats in the quaking aftermath.

Given that even Senator Cruz gave up on defunding and was urging passage of Speaker Boehner’s one-year-delay “Plan B” alternative [Monday] afternoon, even [he] appears to have some modicum of sense.

Does that make the junior senator from Texas a “hidden RINO,” too? Or merely an erstwhile rising star who should be taking a massive hit to his public credibility?

That being said, I hope Mr. Norquist is right about Senator Cruz being “wiser and more experienced” the next time and remembering that even ideological crusades in a legislative context are not like fights in a Bruce Lee movie, but actually require consultation, persuasion, and teamwork. I want to like Ted Cruz; I really do. I have no doubt that his heart’s in the right place, and that he has the smarts to figure all of this out.